Ostriches and Dodos
by Wombat1
Summary: More late night musings from the Deputy Chief of Staff. A sequel of sorts to "Schrödinger's Cat".


Author: Wombat  
  
Title: Ostriches and Dodos  
  
Rating: PG  
  
Summary: More late night musings from the Deputy Chief of Staff. A sequel of sorts to "Schrödinger's Cat".  
  
Disclaimer: All characters and situations are the creative property of Aaron Sorkin - no offence meant or profits made.  
  
Dedication: For the Unnatural Blonde for keeping me unemployed.  
  
  
Ostriches and Dodos   
  
There's something I want to get off my chest - other than this damn scar that is. I look down at it sometimes and I swear it looks back at me. It lurks there like a livid, crimson spider, taunting me. A malevolent, permanent presence, a reminder that some things don't change, don't get better with time and don't get easier to bear. Other times I think it looks like a hand grasping my heart, fingers spread, nothing evading its grasp. Late at night in the dark, in my apartment I swear I can feel its weight. I don't exercise like I used to - I can't stand the sensation of sweat running over the scar tissue - and I suppose that it's nothing more that stress combining with a lack of fitness. That's what Donna would say, right before she delivered fourteen statistics on heart disease, the current AMA position on physical exercise for coronary patients and why I should work shorter hours and give her a raise, but I know the truth. It's trying to kill me. Oh, it's smart, it's biding its time. It's not finished playing with me yet. It has a plan.  
  
Divide and conquer, that's the only chance it has. I mean, one small lump of desiccated platelets and atrophied muscle tissue can't take on the great Joshua Lyman, can it? One mass of dead cells is hardly going to manage what the entire Republican party, West Virginia White Pride and Mandy Hampton have failed to achieve, is it? Give me a stand-up fight and I'll kick ass with the best of them - hell, I do that every day - but it doesn't fight like that. It has my heart in it's fist and it's slowly squeezing the life from it. Paralyse one organ and it's on to the next. The domino effect in action right here in my own body. I have my own sphere of influence - it's not getting anywhere near my brain - my body may weaken before it, but my mind is invulnerable. Every day, though, there's a police action in my heart - and we all know how well those work out.  
  
It's an odd thing, the heart. For a start it's not heart shaped. Who started that in the first place? That neat, even shape you see on every Valentine card and every moron's bumper sticker, that's a cardioid. Now at some point the two got linked, don't ask me how, I guess the President could tell me but I don't have that kind of patience. A real heart looks like a lump, a mess. It's little more than a pulsing mass no-one was meant to ever see. It looks all wrong because it should never be on display - that's a sign that something is badly wrong .If people could see the heart every day, if we truly wore it on our sleeves then it would never have wound up associated with love. Trust me, it's that ugly. You want to draw a heart shape, stick with tradition. Two simple swipes of the pen and there you are. No one wants to see the truth - draw the symbol. It's buried deep within the body for a reason and should always be kept hidden from sight. Except mine wasn't. It's not enough that it's marked forever like a flag of weakness - you want to find my heart just aim for the big, red ink blot on my chest - she's seen it.   
  
I didn't find out for months after the shooting. Sam, naturally, let slip just after I'd returned to the White House, that Donna had seen my operation. Stood in the observation gallery and watched them sever my ribs, pull them apart and expose the raw, bleeding morass beneath. She saw them isolate it from the rest of my body, watched it stop beating and lie there limply oozing whilst they patched it back together. To anyone else the phrase 'she saw right through to my heart' would be romantic hyperbole, for us it's nothing less than the truth. And the harsh, unpitying truth is that nothing changed. Oh, sure, she now has an even greater mandate to pilfer my fries, nag me over my diet and ban my coffee intake but the Josh and Donna show rolls on. Shows daily, folks, come see the longest running double act in Washington. Witness the witty banter and sparkling repartee. Laugh as the demanding yet brilliant boss get no respect from his infuriating, beautiful assistant. Gasp as the Deputy Chief of Staff manages to make it to all of his meetings on time despite a mutinous timepiece and a constant barrage of useless trivia. Come back next year, we'll still be here.   
  
It's not like I wanted things to be different then. Hell, I was fighting with every ounce of energy I had to prove that it was all over, back to normal. Intermission over, time for act two. Christmas proved what a good idea that was but hindsight's 20/20. What can I say? I'm the king of denial and it's a beautiful place to visit. My scar tissue, physical and mental was a shield to cover and protect all that was weak and vulnerable and secret and as time progressed it just grew stronger, more brittle and started to squeeze tighter.  
  
One more useless fact for all you trivia buffs out there that I'm holding in reserve for the next time the President decides that I need to hear about our beloved national parks. After death the heart slowly changes shape until it forms a blunted pyramid. Deep inside, every corpse carries its own mausoleum. If you want to be truly morbid, I'm carrying my own tombstone around with me inside my chest. I've got to stop keeping beer at home. Seriously, this is only my second and already I'm writing my own epitaph. I really think I should leave that to Sam. Toby can always add the punctuation later.  
  
If I don't let Sam do it, he'll only read more of his precious subtext into my version. I mean, does he think that I am an idiot or something? I know CJ's answer to that but I was kinda banking on spanky there. Does he really think that I don't see that Donna and I have been wilfully blind to the obvious for five years now? Okay, I was a little slow on the uptake on this one but even I've spotted that there is a thing. We have a thing. Hell, we are a thing and that leads me to my big confession of the evening.   
  
Ever since I realised that I loved Donna, that I had anchored my life to her, that she was, is as much a part of me as this patched, misshapen heart of mine the whole boss/assistant thing has never been the issue. Don't get me wrong, I'm not underestimating the possibilities of catching seven kinds of hell over it. I'm the political wunderkind of Washington, Bartlett's pit bull, I'm the terror of Capitol Hill. I know exactly how much joy and dancing our collective enemies would experience if this ever came out, I just don't care. It's just a hurdle, an obstacle, another problem to analyse, attack and solve. That's what I do and there's nobody as good at it as I am. As we are. Donna and me versus the moral majority, the Republican agenda and every enemy I ever made? They don't stand a chance. If that were all that were stopping me I could have a strategy on Leo's desk by one tomorrow afternoon. By the time the team had pulled it apart and put it back together we'd be ready for the evening briefing and could bury it in the Friday trash. But this is not about me, this is about us.  
  
I've never experienced anything like the relationship we have. I've met people as smart, as passionate, as committed and nearly as beautiful as she is. Admittedly never all at once but that's not what makes us us. Anyone with half a mind could see how amazing she is as a person and she's been out with most of the ones with half a mind. I even thought Mandy was pretty special at one point, but no-one has ever come close to what we have together. Watch us in action one day and we fit like a perfect match, we complete each others weakness with our strengths, we operate in tandem without thinking, knowing exactly where the other one is. It's like that damn film she made we watch, when I was a prisoner in my own home, about some sports agent - she completes me.  
  
That's what terrifies me, not some bigoted right-winger judging us by their own standards. Tinker with something that close to perfection and you risk losing it. I don't know how we manage it so how could I know what could destroy it? Every time I think that maybe it's worth the risk, that maybe we would only fulfil our promise, maybe it would become something even better, I feel that dead hand around my heart. Every time I wake up in the dark and wonder what it would be like to see her stretched out beside me, I see that evil spider. I wonder what I have to offer her and all I see is that punctured, patched, exposed and marked organ in my chest.   
  
Donna has seen me open and bleeding, reduced to a helpless infant unable to feed or bathe myself. She's seen me incapable of walking to the bathroom to relieve myself, she's held me in the dark as I wake screaming and sweating from another nightmare. She's helped me stagger home after three beers and she's stood in my office with tears in my eyes as I tore into her to cover my own pain. She's been there throughout my highs and lows and seen every side of me and most of my insides. She knows the depths of my soul and the heights of my dreams. She knows me better than I know myself and that's all I have to offer her - it could never be enough, could it?  
  
So I sit here in the dark as the fear tightens my chest and I feel the scar clutch tighter. Paralyse the heart first and then on to the next target, but it hasn't won yet. Tomorrow we'll all stand out in the cold and watch the President get sworn in again. Tomorrow we'll start another four year fight together, side by side. While there's life there's hope, and there's life in this scuffed, beaten heart yet.  
  
  
  
  
  
"So where does love come in? It's not strictly necessary, is it? We can build dams, like the beaver, without love. We can organize complex societies, like the bee, without love. We can travel long distances, like the albatross, without love. We can put our heads in the sand, like the ostrich, without love. We can die out as a species, like the dodo, without love."Julian Barnes - 'A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters  



End file.
